


In Dreams

by RoryKurago



Series: First Floor People [2]
Category: Pacific Rim
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Fight Club - Freeform, Other, PTSD, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-02
Updated: 2015-10-02
Packaged: 2018-04-24 08:59:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4913305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In her dreams, Mako kills kaiju.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Not the additional prompt I meant in that comment, but this happened as well.  
> Ask meme prompt #16: 'in dreams'

In her dreams Mako kills kaiju. She’s made of metal and bone and she hunts the cancer that killed Mori Masao (grown huge and crustaceous outside him). Her heart beats for two.

But sometimes that second is her mother. In those dreams, they go to Tokyo together to push the malpractice suit against the doctor. The men who come to their rented apartment to persuade them to drop the case come as skyscrapers—monstrous and twisted as cancerous lungs, spitting fire that peppers the concrete behind Mako as she runs.

In the worst of those dreams Mako finds herself suddenly alone and she screams.

From those ones she wakes and has to lie still, counting her breathing, grounding herself in the blankets-bedframe-floorboards that need sweeping. Sometimes there’s a hand between her shoulder blades but more often there’s not: Chuck up and on his feet already, away in the kitchen in the pre-dawn dark making tea, wrestling with his own demons in ways Mako can understand but not follow.

Mako let out another slow breath, pressing her cheek into the cotton sheets. The sun was barely up: a sliver of red scarred the wall by the door, thread-thin like a skipping rope welt. Raleigh, behind her, hadn’t moved. But she could hear his breathing.

She turned her head; laid the other cheek on the sheets so she could watch him. His breaths came in time with hers. Chuck, she reflected, had his own ways of wrestling with demons but he didn’t understand Mako’s. Not really. But Raleigh: sitting all the way up with his back to the wall, spidering his fingers across the scars on his knuckles—

He was watching her, sleepy-eyed but wide awake. Without shifting from her hollow in the mattress, Mako lifted a hand over to where the sheet pulled down at his bare hip and traced the purpling outline of a heel with her finger. He didn’t stop her. His fingers curled like they missed the shape of a cigarette, but they settled for stroking the back of her hand. Today, he didn’t speak. His throat was hoarse, she guessed, and if she went into the kitchen she would find Chuck sulking with more bruises than he went to bed with because he still hadn’t learnt that when Raleigh had nightmares, he came out of them fast, and bypassed _flight_ straight for _fight_.

His fingers trailed up from her wrist. Over sinews and scars, until finally they came to rest above her elbow. His thumb hovered on the point of her tattoo. The chainsword. His mouth twisted.

He knew. From the way he talked and flailed and came up counting from his brother’s name some days, Mako reflected, he knew. Because in the best of Mako’s dreams, she has steel sinews and liquid fire in her veins.

She comes back fighting too.


End file.
